Are You Ready for a 4-Day Work Week?
Not until what you understand what work is for
Each week, this newsletter offers you a skimmable analysis of American work culture, including a trend, a study, a tale, and a switch.
This week, we’re gonna talk about the shape of the work week.
You think you work a lot. Folks used to work 80-100 hours a week in the early 1800s. Later, President Grant reduced government work to 8-hour days. Then, Henry Ford did the math in the 1920s and started paying $5 per 8-hr workday. The 40-hr work week became American law in 1940. (Read more here.)
But too often—including during the Great Resignation—companies have designed work based on what Thomas Princen calls a logic of efficiency rather than a logic of sufficiency. Workers and workplaces struggle with how much work is enough, when it’s not clear what work is for.
What is the purpose of work? Survival? Wealth-building? Legacy? Care for others? Personal growth? Relief from boredom? National growth? My organizational research has uncovered many such answers—along with the claim that work isn’t for anything.
But how would you answer that question, What is work for?
Trend
In 2022, 61 companies in the U.K. tried out a 4-day work week for 6 months. This year, 54 of those companies are still holding the line. In the workaholic United States, 29 companies have experimented with the 40-hour work week, including Panasonic North America, Bolt, Digible, and D'Youville University. But even should Kamala Harris’s “care economy” win this year’s election, American workers won’t reach the Promised Land of 5-day weekends that John Maynard Keynes one predicted from the depths of the Great Depression. But workism—or the quasi religious notion that toil will give you transcendence—does seem to be on the wane.
Study
Julia Topp, Jan Hendrik Hille, Michael Neumann, and David Motefindt have presented a paper entitled “How a 4-Day Work Week and Remote Work Affect Agile Software Development Teams.” Their case study found that worker stress increased in a shortened week—but that employees also felt more job satisfaction. There weresome detrimental effects on company culture, including disengagement during meetings. (Check out the Mode/Switchers podcast on Too. Many. Meetings.)
Story
Here’s a quick tale adapted from my recent book. One millennial professional I spoke with described, with an almost disgusted awe, how his Gen Xer father “has had this sense that his work very much is his calling, and he derives basically an infinite amount of energy from the ability to—” Here, I broke good form as a researcher and laughed. But the interviewee cut back in, “I'm serious. It's like the man has worked almost seven days a week for decades now. I mean, it's absolutely insane.” I tell this story to raise the point that the four-day work week faces not only policy obstacles but generational barriers as well.
Switch
Four-day work weeks won’t solve our problems, if we can’t discern what work is for. Derek Thompson has written, “On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working: It’s about buying free time.” I love his cut-the-crap brevity. But I’m not satisfied with describing work as coinage. Doesn’t that suggest that work is for shopping and that time is for sale? Why not simply say, work is made for rest? That claim says more clearly that the goal of work is being human.
Even in the midst of hard toil, can’t you sometimes feel, in your own stillness and attention, the deepest inheritance of your humanity?
Why I Write the Mode/Switch
This passion project aims to help you convert the intensities of the modern American workplace into a sustainable and shareable posture towards work. I found that passion by listening to professionals like you, and I share their stories—you guessed it—in the newly released volume Digital Overwhelm.
LWYW
Hannah Sherbrooke is the Mode/Switch’s graphic designer, and she’s also our audio designer, providing weekly playlists to accompany your four- or five- or six- day work week.